Peter Hain to chair Labour party organisation task force

Peter Hain has been appointed to lead Labour's task force on party organisation, which is designed to put it at the heart of community politics. The task force, billed as an unbureaucratic process, will also look at how individual trade union members could be better involved in the leadership election . Hain told a meeting of Labour MPs last night that the party has to reach out to local communities and once again become the core of civil society in Britain, "beyond the unions, but including the unons". The Miliband leadership team has stressed that it is not seeking to drive unions out of the leadership process. At its most limited, following a report by Hain to next year's conference, the party is likely to agree that members of the electoral college should only be able to vote once. Union levy payers who are also party members would not, as a result, have two votes. Similarily, MPs might be prevented from voting as individual party members. Hain's appointment is another sign of the faith placed in him by Miliband, even though the MP narrowly failed to get elected to the shadow cabinet. Miliband has already appointed Hain to chair the national policy forum, with Liam Byrne, the former Treasury chief secretary, to oversee a two year policy reviewwhich will take soundings from outside the narrow confines of the party. Miliband has been struck by the way in which some larger constituency parties, including some in London and Birmingham, bucked the trend away from Labour in the May general election. He believes political parties can once again become mass parties and that the inexorable decline in party memberships is not inevitable. Labour last had a surge in membership in 1996-97, but many New Labour figures admit they failed to capitalise on it, and dismissed the importance of party organisation. Miliband told the Guardian: "We have got to give people a voice in the party. You've got to lighten-up in terms of how policy is made. We've got to use this year, and we will do that to look at how you give members more of a voice – not back to the 1980s – but I think genuinely more voice". Discussing the future role of the unions, he said "What I don't think is that it would be right to disenfranchise those union levy payers. There were hundreds of thousands of people who voted in that leadership election and were engaging with the party. It wasn't about union barons. It was union levy payers".